Bleeding Edge

€ 29.95

Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the
internet

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the
collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of 'september
11th. 'silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent
angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil
Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at
the height of the tech bubble, but there's no shortage of swindlers
looking to grab a piece of what's left.

Maxine Tarnow is
running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West
'side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists.

'she used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a
while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now
she can follow her own code of ethics carry a Beretta, do business
with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts without having too
much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom
two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort
of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the
neighborhood till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a
computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things
begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. 'she soon
finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a
professional nose obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, a neoliberal
enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and
various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of
whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long
Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us
a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet,
not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where
we've journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to
justice? Will Maxine have to take